Hostility to socialism, anti-communism and the limits of bourgeois
scholarship

By Dave Silver, 28 November 2000

A critical analysis of Robert Service'sA History of Twentieth-Century Russia
Harvard University Press, 1997

Robert Service, Professor of Russian History and Politics at the
School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London and the author
of a trilogy on Lenin is one of the western world's leading
scholars on Russian and Soviet history. The author uses a mass of
material provided by the post Soviet regime which includes documentary
collections, memoirs and archival material. While the author provides
a useful source of certain factual information such as the description
of the January 1924 Party Conference and the attack on Trotsky's
Left Opposition by supporters of Stalin. Or we can reference fairly
accurately the Civil War of 1918–21 and the role of the White
Armies under Kolchack and Denikin. On other questions such as the New
Economic Policy (NEP) promulgated by Lenin we begin to see the impact
of Service's bourgeois liberal ideology. While acknowledging that
Lenin saw this policy as a temporary and necessary retreat into
privatization, he attributes Lenin's motive as needed to
“sustain the political dictatorship” and therefore offered
“economic relaxations.” The code word dictatorship is
completely ripped out of context, with no reference to the impact of
the Civil War and not a hint that “dictatorship” in the
Marxist sense, and used by Lenin in all his writings meant a counter
to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of
production as well as the rural capitalists and landowners.

However I wish to focus on the outright lies, distortions, half truths
and its accompanying conclusions which are fueled by an ideology that
is essentially liberal, pragmatic, anti-communist and reflects an
intense hatred for socialism both theoretical and actual. Permeating
the entire book, anti-communism (then Bolshevism) is cloaked in a
liberal disguise which uses the cutting edge code word Stalinism or
Stalinist. We find this entry in the Introduction. “Office
holders thought of themselves as Marxist-Leninists (M-L), but
increasingly they behaved as if Russia's interest should have
precedence over aspirations to world wide revolution.” Service
nourishes the notion that people who regard themselves as M-L are ipso
facto deficient politically and in addition he gives credence to the
Trotskyite concept of permanent or world revolution. Service commits,
consciously I believe, the error of calling the Soviet Union the first
communist rather than socialist state. Also in the Intro we find
passages “one party dictatorship” and an enforcement of
“an official ideology,” in which Stalin “hurled the
country into forced industrialization and agricultural
collectivization.” Service would prefer the staged elections of
capitalist democracy in which the masses have absolutely no voice in
choosing candidates as long as they have at least two Parties that are
puppets for the ruling class and no one to challenge the system.
Service cannot see that rapid industrialization and expropriating the
rich peasant kulak class was essential to the development and survival
of the USSR.

In Terror Upon Terror and the trials between 1934–8 Service
serves us the ultimate condemnation of Stalin. In vain do we find the
name of the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union , Joseph
P. Davies. He attended all the trials which condemned some Party
leaders to death. Davies said unequivocally that the defendants were
guilty of collective attempts to undermine the socialist system
including collaboration with German and Japanese imperialism.
Weren't similar big lies told by the western media as to the
“crimes” of Stalin in Nazi occupied Vinnitsa in the
Ukraine in 1943.

A PBS “documentary” showed skulls in mass graves and
panned over to a photo of Stalin. A German soldier in fact wrote to
both American and Soviet interrogators in 1945 saying these were
graves of Nazi victims. Other outright fabrications by Service
include Stalin's alleged “near catastrophic
blunders”in 1941–2, apparently alluding to Stalin's
role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. However Service
ignores the Memoirs of Marshall Zhukov. At the 1941 meeting of the
Politburo of the Central Committee of the All Union Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) which was called by Stalin, Zhukov praises him for
reorganizing the Armed Forces strategic command system into the
General Headquarters of the Supreme Command with Stalin as
Chairman. As Ken Cameron in his brilliant book Stalin-Man of
Contradiction (NC Press Toronto 1987) notes; Speaking of the
campaign at vilification of Stalin “we could hardly have
predicted its scope. Sometimes it employs simple fantasy,
constructing for mass consumption the vision of a power mad dictator
wantonly slaughtering ‘millions’ of people (from
4–60 depending on the estimator). Sometimes we get the more
sophisticated picture of a cunning intriguer pushing aside the true
‘democratic’ socialists and installing a regime of grey
regimentation.” He concludes that “this vilification
serves to attack the Soviet Union and socialism, for clearly such a
monster could only function in a nation of moronic robots.” I
will add the thought that there would have been such a moral decay and
anarchy that it would have been impossible to defeat German fascism.

Anti-communism oozes out when he discusses the “Hungarian
Uprising” in 1956 for example. Service is quick to point out
that “the Soviet Army moved against the rebels.” He
conveniently leaves out the glaring fact that the leader of the
rebels' “Resistance” was a clerical fascist by the
name of Cardinal Mindzsenty. Counter revolution is the more
appropriate word to describe that event. In a chapter titled the
First Five Year Plan the author contradicts his earlier statement on
Stalin's negative role of “forced industrialization.”
He admits that “Stalin had engineered a second revolution; he
had completed the groundwork of an economic transformation.”
Service then concludes that for “Stalin the realization of the
First Five Year Plan could only be the first victory in the long
campaign for his personal dictatorship and his construction of a
mighty industrial state.”

It is obvious that this bourgeois scholar's ideological hostility
to Marxism, socialism and revolution must counterbalance a favorable
image with a demonization of Stalin. In the field of Culture and
Modernization, Service points to the enormously successful literacy,
theatre, ballet, educational, cultural and sports explosion. He
mentions the fact that the technical prowess of building large new
cities like Magnitogorsk was indeed a huge accomplishment. Yet he
contends there was an ulterior motive; because they wished “to
expand the social base of their (the Bolsheviks) support.”

Service makes incredible allegations without a shred of documentation.
The Red Army soldiers who marched into Europe “had seen things
that made them question the domestic policies of their own
government.” And other citizens who never crossed the boundaries
of the USSR “had had experiences which increased their
antagonism to the Soviet regime.” In another example worthy of
tabloid journalism the author gives us this gem; “For Stalin,
therefore (sic) military victory in 1945 presented many risks.”
In the Notes for this entry he says “This has also been true at
the end of the First Five-Year Plan: another ‘triumph’;
marred for him by the attendant menace to his regime.” Pure
political speculation that not only underpins the perception of Stalin
the monster but is an attack on a really existing socialist state.

The counter revolutionary “new thinking” substitutes
“universal human values” for class struggle and sees
capitalism and socialism as becoming more and more like each other in
a global economy. This is what Gorbachev's foreign minister,
Kozyrev called the “convergence theory.” There were
historical precedents; the Frankfurt School of Sociology in the
20's, (whom Brecht aptly labeled as the “intellectual pimps
for the bourgeoisie”) that tried to synthesize Marxism and
Freudianism, in the 30's we witnessed the Phenomenological school
of Marxism, the Praxis group in Yugoslavia, The Marxist-Humanists of
Poland and the so called Euro-Communism of the 70's.

All of these movements have at least one fundamental premise in
common; a belief that “orthodox” or
“traditional” Marxism is outmoded and no longer the best
guide for Struggle and the eventual achievement of Socialism. These
new thinkers are searching for a third hybrid way neither capitalist
nor socialist.

To the era of Glasnost and Perestroika. Service gives the highest
praise to Gorbachev and a bit less so to Yeltsin. The author duly
notes the role of both in liquidating the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, ongoing imperialist destabilization and by 1970 the
Soviet economy had the world's second largest industrial capacity
with free health care, education, no unemployment or homelessness and
while most people were poor by western standards, hunger and crime was
a rarity. Yet the successful counter revolution orchestrated by the
new thinkers with a stamp of approval by both men that led to
gangsterism, crime, homelessness, poverty, prostitution and a handful
of rich entrepreneurs is lauded in this book. It shouldn't be
surprising that the traitors, revisionists and opportunists are found
in the Reference Chapter Notes; Trotsky, Martov (Menshevik) Djilas the
Yugoslav who created a new class, an intellectual pimp like Medvedev
and the demented religious Czarist Solzhenitsyn.

From Cameron's Marxism—A Living Science
International Pub. 1993 “It is time to set our sights on the
future, to perceive through the mist of capitalist obfuscation that
the world revolutionary thrust that Marx and Engels projected and
Lenin witnessed is still operating, inexorably, like the giant forces
of nature—with which it is increasingly blended.”